Chennai: Tamilnadu Chief Minister M K Stalin has announced that the birth anniversary of late DMK patriarch, former CM and his father M Karunanidhi on 3 June will be celebrated as a government function every year.

Making a Statement Under Rule 110 in the State Assembly, he also said a statue of Karunanidhi will be installed at the Omandurar Government Estate in the city on that day.

Listing out the innumerable achievements of the late DMK president
and the various welfare measures launched by him, Stalin said he had
an unparalleled record of having served as Chief Minister for five times,
spreading over 19 years.

Stalin said the leader has a unique distinction of having not lost even a single election he had contested and has won the Assembly polls a record 13 times.

‘Karunanidhi created the modern Tamilnadu that we see today. He created all the symbols of Tamilnadu. He lived as a leader and was a
guide to this pervasive Indian politics. Karunanidhi has a stupendous record which no other politician might have achieved.’

When he had won his 13th term to the State Assembly from his home
turf of Tiruvarur by a margin of 68,366 votes in the 2016 Assembly polls,
it was biggest victory margin ever in his electoral politics.

His electoral winning record was perhaps unmatched in the country, as
he maintained the unblemished record of having not lost any elections.

Karunanidhi, who passed away on 7 August, 2018 due to age-related illness,
was first elected to the State Assembly from Kulithalai in 1957 in the composite Thanjavur district as an Independent (the DMK then was not a recognised party), when Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was India’s Prime Minister.

Now, when the fourth generation of the Nehru family was in politics, the
nonagenarian from the Dravidian heartland and his hunger for success in
the electoral battlefield was proved when he won his 13th Assembly
elections by a record margin.

This was the highest ever victory margin achieved by the late DMK Patriarch
in his career, bettering the margin of 50,249 votes he secured in Tiruvarur in
the 2011 polls.

The DMK veteran’s electoral winning record was perhaps unmatched
in the country.

Karunanidhi, who had won each of the 13 Assembly polls, had contested
from Chennai city in the elections held from 1967 to 2006 (he did not contest
in 1984), before switching to Tiruvrur in 2011.

While he represented the rural constituencies of Kulithalai (1957), Thanjavur (1962) and Tiruvarur (2011) for a term each in the Assembly, he was twice elected from Saidapet (1967 and 1971), Anna Nagar (1977 and 1980) and
Harbour (1989 and 1991) in Chennai. He was elected from Chepauk in the city in 1996, 2001 and 2006.

The DMK chief’s winning streak would have been a notch higher had he
contested in 1984, when AIADMK founder MGR, famously won lying in a
hospital bed in Brooklyn, US.
Karunanidhi chose to stay away from the
polls as he was elected to the then Legislative Council (now defunct)
after resigning his MLA post in 1983 in protest against the attack on
Tamils in Sri Lanka.

Karunanidhi had won even while his party had lost the polls on five
occasions.

However, two of his victories would stand out. In 1980, when MGR
fielded H V Hande, a medical practitioner in Anna Nagar against
Karunanidhi, the then DMK chief faced his toughest electoral battle
before winning by a narrow margin of 699 votes.

The next tough electoral battle he faced was in 1991 when he was the
lone DMK candidate to win, but by a thin margin of 890 votes in Harbour
as the AIADMK-Congress combine swept the polls on the sympathy wave
following the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in
Sriperumbudur.